Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley

by Robert Sheckley

  Slowly, carefully, Bairthre opened the Flipper’s door.

  “I don’t care!” Bartholder yelled. “Which one? Speak up, you miserable coward! Which one? I’ll give you a fair fight. Speak up or I’ll shoot you both here and now!”

  “And what would the boys say?” Barthold scoffed. “They’d say that the one-handed man lost his nerve and killed two unarmed strangers!”

  Ben Bartholder’s iron gun hand sagged.

  “Quick, get in,” Barthold whispered.

  They scrambled in and slammed the door. Bartholder put the derringer away.

  “All right, mister,” Ben Bartholder said. “You been here twice, and I think you’ll be here a third time. I’ll wait around. The next time I’ll get you.”

  He turned and walked away.

  They had to get out of Memphis. But where could they go? Barthold wouldn’t consider Konigsberg, 1676, and the Black Death. London, 1595, was filled with Tom Barthal’s criminal friends, any of whom would cheerfully cut Barthold’s throat for treachery.

  “We’ll go all the way back,” Bairthre said. “To Maiden’s Castle.”

  “And if he comes there?”

  “He won’t. It’s against the law to go past the thousand-year limit. And would an insurance man break the law?”

  “He might not,” Barthold said thoughtfully. “He just might not. It’s worth a try.”

  And again he activated the Flipper.

  They slept in an open field that night, a mile from the fortress of Maiden’s Castle. They stayed beside the Flipper and took turns at sentry duty. And finally the sun rose, warm and yellow, above the green fields.

  “He didn’t come,” Bairthre said.

  “What?” Barthold asked, waking with a start.

  “Snap out of it, man! We’re safe. Is it morning yet in your Present?”

  “It’s morning,” Barthold said, rubbing his eyes.

  “Then we’ve won and I’ll be a king in Ireland!”

  “Yes, we’ve won,” Barthold said. “Victory at last is—damn!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “That investigator! Look over there!”

  Bairthre stared across the fields, muttering, “I don’t see a thing. Are you sure—”

  Barthold struck him across the back of the skull with a stone. He had picked it up during the night and saved it for this purpose.

  He bent over and felt Bairthre’s pulse. The Irishman still lived but would be unconscious for a few hours. When he recovered, he would be alone and kingdomless.

  Too bad, Barthold thought. But under the circumstances, it would be risky to bring Bairthre back with him. How much easier it would be to walk up to Inter-Temporal himself and collect a check for Everett Barthold. Then return in half an hour and collect another check for Everett Barthold.

  And how much more profitable it would be!

  He climbed into the Flipper and looked once more at his unconscious kinsman. What a shame, he thought, that he will never be a king in Ireland.

  But then, he thought, history would probably find it confusing if he had succeeded.

  He activated the controls, headed straight for the Present.

  He reappeared in the back yard of his house. Quickly he bounded up the steps and pounded on the door.

  “Who’s there?” Mavis called.

  “Me!” Barthold shouted. “It’s all right, Mavis—everything has worked out fine!”

  “Who?” Mavis opened the door, stared at him, and let out a shriek.

  “Calm down,” Barthold said. “I know it’s been a strain, but it’s all over now. I’m going for the check and then we’ll—”

  He stopped. A man had just appeared in the doorway beside Mavis. He was a short man, beginning to bald, his features ordinary, and his eyes were mild behind horn-rimmed glasses.

  It was himself.

  “Oh, no!” Barthold groaned.

  “Oh, yes,” his double said. “One cannot venture beyond the thousand-year barrier with impunity, Everett. Sometimes there is a sound reason for a law. I am your time-identical.”

  Barthold stared at the Barthold in the doorway. He said, “I was chased—”

  “By me,” his double told him. “In disguise, of course, since you have a few enemies in time. You imbecile, why did you run?”

  “I thought you were an investigator. Why were you chasing me?”

  “For one reason and one reason only.”

  “What was that?”

  “We could have been rich beyond our wildest dreams,” his double said, “if only you hadn’t been so guilty and frightened! The three of us—you, Bairthre, and me—could have gone to Inter-Temporal and claimed triple indemnity!”

  “Triple indemnity!” Barthold breathed. “I never thought of it.”

  “The sum would have been staggering. It would have been infinitely more than for double indemnity. You disgust me.”

  “Well,” Barthold said, “what’s done is done. At least we can collect for double indemnity, then decide—”

  “I collected both checks and signed the release forms for you. You weren’t here, you know.”

  “In that case, I’d like my share.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” his double told him.

  “But it’s mine! I’ll go to Inter-Temporal and tell them—”

  “They won’t listen. I’ve waived all your rights. You can’t even stay in the Present, Everett.”

  “Don’t do this to me!” Barthold begged.

  “Why not? Look at what you did to Bairthre.”

  “Damn it, you can’t judge me!” Barthold cried. “You’re me!”

  “Who else is there to judge you except yourself?” his double asked him.

  Barthold couldn’t cope with that. He turned to Mavis.

  “Darling,” he said, “you always told me you’d know your own husband. Don’t you know me now?”

  Mavis moved back into the house. As she went, Barthold noticed the flash of ruumstones around her neck and asked no more.

  Barthold and Barthold stood face to face. The double raised his arm. A police heli, hovering low, dropped to the ground. Three policemen piled out.

  “This is what I was afraid of, officers,” the double said. “My double collected his check this morning, as you know. He waived his rights and went into the past. I was afraid he’d return and try for more.”

  “He won’t bother you again, sir,” a policeman said. He turned to Barthold. “You! Climb back in that Flipper and get out of the Present. The next time we see you, we shoot!”

  Barthold knew when he was beaten. Very humbly, he said, “I’ll gladly go, officers. But my Flipper needs repairs. It doesn’t have a time clock.”

  “You should have thought about that before signing the waiver,” the policeman said. “Get moving!”

  “Please!” Barthold said.

  “No,” Barthold answered.

  No mercy. And Barthold knew that, in his double’s place, he would have said exactly the same thing.

  He climbed into the Flipper and closed the door. Numbly he contemplated his choices, if they could be called that.

  New York, 1912, with its maddening reminders of his own time and with Bully Jack Barthold? Or Memphis, 1869, with Ben Bartholder awaiting his third visit? Or Konigsberg, 1676, with the grinning, vacant face of Hans Baerthaler for company, and the Black Death? Or London, 1595, with Tom Barthal’s cutthroat friends searching the streets for him? Or Maiden’s Castle, 662, with an angry Connor Lough mac Bairthre waiting to even the score?

  It really didn’t matter. This time, he thought, let the place pick me.

  He closed his eyes and blindly stabbed a button.

  HOLDOUT

  THE CREW of a spaceship must be friends. They must live harmoniously in order to achieve the split-second interaction that becomes necessary from time to time. In space, one mistake is usually enough.

  It is axiomatic that even the best ships have their accidents; the mediocre ones don’t survive.


  Knowing this, it can be understood how Captain Sven felt when, four hours before blastoff, he was told that radioman Forbes would not serve with the new replacement.

  Forbes hadn’t met the new replacement yet, and didn’t want to. Hearing about him was enough. There was nothing personal in this, Forbes explained. His refusal was on purely racial grounds.

  “Are you sure of this?” Captain Sven asked, when his chief engineer came to the bridge with the news.

  “Absolutely certain, sir,” said engineer Hao. He was a small, flat-faced, yellow-skinned man from Canton. “We tried to handle it ourselves. But Forbes wouldn’t budge.”

  Captain Sven sat down heavily in his padded chair. He was deeply shocked. He had considered racial hatred a thing of the remote past. He was as astonished at a real-life example of it as he would have been to encounter a dodo, a moa, or a mosquito.

  “Racialism in this day and age!” Sven said. “Really, it’s too preposterous. It’s like telling me they’re burning heretics in the village square, or threatening warfare with cobalt bombs.”

  “There wasn’t a hint of it earlier,” said Hao. “It came as a complete surprise.”

  “You’re the oldest man on the ship,” Sven said. “Have you tried reasoning him out of this attitude?”

  “I’ve talked to him for hours,” Hao said. “I pointed out that for centuries we Chinese hated the Japanese, and vice versa. If we could overcome our antipathy for the sake of the Great Cooperation, why couldn’t he?”

  “Did it do any good?”

  “Not a bit. He said it just wasn’t the same thing.”

  Sven bit off the end of a cigar with a vicious gesture, lighted it, and puffed for a moment. “Well, I’m damned if I’ll have anything like this on my ship. I’ll get another radioman!”

  “That won’t be too easy, sir,” Hao said. “Not here.”

  Sven frowned thoughtfully. They were on Discaya II, a small outpost planet in the Southern Star Reaches. Here they had unloaded a cargo of machine parts, and taken on the Company-assigned replacement who was the innocent source of all the trouble. Discaya had plenty of trained men, but they were all specialists in hydraulics, mining, and allied fields. The planet’s single radio operator was happy where he was, had a wife and children on Discaya, owned a house in a pleasant suburb, and would never consider leaving.

  “Ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous,” Sven said. “I can’t spare Forbes, and I’ll not leave the new man behind. It wouldn’t be fair. Besides, the Company would probably fire me. And rightly, rightly. A captain should be able to handle trouble aboard his own ship.”

  Hao nodded glumly.

  “Where is this Forbes from?”

  “A farm near an isolated village in the mountain country of the Southern United States. Georgia, sir. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”

  “I think so,” said Sven, who had taken a course in Regional Characteristics at Uppsala, to better fit himself for the job of captain. “Georgia produces peanuts and hogs.”

  “And men,” Hao added. “Strong, capable men. You’ll find Georgians working on all frontiers, out of all proportions to their actual numbers. Their reputation is unexcelled.”

  “I know all this,” Sven grumbled. “And Forbes is an excellent man. But this racialism—”

  “Forbes can’t be considered typical,” Hao said. “He was raised in a small, isolated community, far from the mainstream of American life. Similar communities all over the world develop and cling to strange folkways. I remember a village in Honan where—”

  “I still find it hard to believe,” Sven said, interrupting what promised to be a long dissertation on Chinese country life. “And there’s simply no excuse for it. Every community everywhere has a heritage of some sort of racial feeling. But it’s every individual’s responsibility to rid himself of that when he enters the mainstream of Terran life. Others have. Why not Forbes? Why must he inflict his problems on us? Wasn’t he taught anything about the Great Cooperation?”

  Hao shrugged his shoulders. “Would you care to speak to him, Captain?”

  “Yes. Wait, I’ll speak to Angka first.”

  The chief engineer left the bridge. Sven remained deep in thought until he heard a knock at the door.

  “Come in.”

  Angka entered. He was cargo foreman, a tall, splendidly proportioned man with skin the color of a ripe plum. He was a full-blooded Negro from Ghana, and a first-class guitar player.

  “I assume,” Sven said, “you know all about the trouble.”

  “It’s unfortunate, sir,” Angka said.

  “Unfortunate? It’s downright catastrophic! You know the risk involved in taking the ship up in this condition. I’m supposed to blast off in less than three hours. We can’t sail without a radioman, and we need the replacement, too.”

  Angka stood impassively, waiting.

  Sven flicked an inch of white ash from his cigar. “Now look, Angka, you must know why I called you here.”

  “I can guess, sir,” Angka said, grinning.

  “You’re Forbes’s best friend. Can’t you do something with him?”

  “I’ve tried, Captain, Lord knows I’ve tried. But you know Georgians.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Good men, sir, but stubborn as mules. Once they’ve made up their minds, that’s it. I’ve been talking to Forbes for two days about this. I got him drunk last night—strictly in line of duty, sir,” Angka added hastily.

  “It’s all right. Go on.”

  “And I talked to him like I’d talk to my own son. Reminded him how good the crew got along. All the fun we’d had in all the ports. How good the Cooperation felt. Now look, Jimmy, I said to him, you keep on like this, you kill all that. You don’t want that, do you, I asked him. He bawled like a baby, sir.”

  “But he wouldn’t change his mind?”

  “Said he couldn’t. Told me I might as well quit trying. There was one and only one race in this galaxy he wouldn’t serve with, and there was no sense talking about it. Said his pappy would spin in his grave if he were to do so.”

  “Is there any chance he’ll change his mind?” Sven asked.

  “I’ll go on trying, but I don’t think there’s a chance.”

  He left. Captain Sven sat, his jaw cradled in one big hand. He glanced again at the ship’s chronometer. Less than three hours before blastoff!

  He lifted the receiver of the intercom and asked for a direct line to the spacefield tower. When he was in contact with the officer in charge he said, “I’d like to request permission to stay a few days longer.”

  “Wish I could grant it, Captain Sven,” the officer said. “But we need the pit. We can only handle one interstellar ship at a time here. An ore boat from Calayo is due in five hours. They’ll probably be short of fuel.”

  “They always are,” Sven said.

  “Tell you what we can do. If it’s a serious mechanical difficulty, we could find a couple cranes, lower your ship to horizontal, and drag it off the field. Might be quite a while before we could set it up again, though.”

  “Thanks, but never mind. I’ll blast on schedule.” He signed off. He couldn’t allow his ship to become laid up like that. The Company would have his hide, not a doubt about it.

  But there was a course of action he could take. An unpleasant one, but necessary. He got to his feet, discarded the dead cigar stump, and marched out of the bridge.

  He came to the ship’s infirmary. The doctor, in his white coat, was seated with his feet on a desk, reading a three-month-old German medical journal.

  “Welcome, Cap. Care for a shot of strictly medicinal brandy?”

  “I could use it,” Sven said.

  The young doctor poured out two healthy doses from a bottle marked Swamp Fever Culture.

  “Why the label?” Sven asked.

  “Discourages the men from sampling. They have to steal the cook’s lemon extract.” The doctor’s name was Yitzhak Vilkin. He was an Israeli, a gra
duate of the new medical school at Beersheba.

  “You know about the Forbes problem?” Sven asked.

  “Everybody does.”

  “I wanted to ask you, in your capacity as medical officer aboard this ship: Have you ever observed any previous indications of racial hatred in Forbes?”

  “Not one,” Vilkin answered promptly.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Israelis are good at sensing that sort of thing. I assure you, it caught me completely by surprise. I’ve had some lengthy interviews with Forbes since, of course.”

  “Any conclusions?”

  “He’s honest, capable, straightforward, and slightly simple. He possesses some antiquated attitudes in the form of ancient traditions. The Mountain-Georgians, you know, have a considerable body of such customs. They’ve been much studied by anthropologists from Samoa and Fiji. Haven’t you read Coming of Age in Georgia? Or Folkways of Mountain-Georgia?”

  “I don’t have time for such things,” Sven said. “My time is pretty well occupied running this ship without me having to read up on the individual psychology of the entire crew.”

  “I suppose so, Cap,” the doctor said. “Well, those books are in the ship’s library, if you’d care to glance at them. I don’t see how I can help you. Re-education takes time. I’m a medical officer anyhow, not a psychologist. The plain fact is this: There is one race that Forbes will not serve with, one race which causes him to enact all his ancient racial hostilities. Your new man, by some mischance, happens to be from that race.”

  “I’m leaving Forbes behind,” Sven said abruptly. “The communications officer can learn how to handle the radio. Forbes can take the next ship back to Georgia.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Forbes is very popular with the crew. They think he’s damned unreasonable, but they wouldn’t be happy sailing without him.”

  “More disharmony,” Sven mused. “Dangerous, very dangerous. But damn it, I can’t leave the new man behind. I won’t. It isn’t fair! Who runs this ship, me or Forbes?”

  “A very interesting question,” Vilkin observed, and ducked quickly as the irate captain hurled his glass at him.